The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 6, December 1863 Devoted to Literature and National Policy

The Project Gutenberg EBook of Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI,

December 1863, by Various

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Title: Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863

Devoted to Literature and National Policy.

Author: Various

Release Date: July 30, 2006 [EBook #18946]

Language: English

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THE

CONTINENTAL MONTHLY:

DEVOTED TO

Literature and National Policy.

VOL. IV.—DECEMBER, 1963.—No. VI.

CONTENTS

THE NATION.

We are of the race of the Empire Builders. Some races have been sent into the world to destroy. Ours has been sent to create. It was needed that the blunders of ten centuries and more, across the water, should be given a chance for amendment. On virgin soil, the European races might cure themselves of the fever pains of ages. So they were called here to try. There was no rubbish to sweep away. The mere destructive had no occupation. The builder and creator was the man wanted. In the full glow of civilization, with the accumulated experience of the toiling generations, with all the wealth of the fruitful past, we, 'the foremost in the files of time,' have been called to this business of nation making.

The men of our blood, they say, are given to boasting. America adds flashing nerve fire to the dull muscle of Europe. That is the fact. But the tendency to boasting is an honest inheritance. We can hardly boast louder than our fathers across the sea have taught us. The boasting of New York can scarcely drown the boasting of London. Jonathan thinks highly of himself, but, certainly, John Bull is not behind him in self-esteem.

But, after all, what wonder? Ten centuries of victory over nature and over men may give a race the right to boast—ten centuries of victory with never a defeat! The English tongue is an arrogant tongue, we grant. Command, mastery, lordliness, are bred into its tones. The old tongue of the Romans was never deeper marked in those respects than our own. It is a freeman's speech, this mother language. A slave can never speak it. He garbles, clips, and mumbles it, makes 'quarter talk' of it. The hour he learns to speak English he is spoiled for a slave. It is the tongue of conquerors, the language of imperial will, of self-asserting individuality, of courage, masterhood, and freedom. There is no need of being thin-skinned under the charge of boasting. A man cannot very well learn, in his cradle, 'the tongue that Shakspeare spake,' without talking sometimes as if he and his owned creation.

For the tongue is the representative of the speaker. A people embodies its soul in its language. And the people who inherit English have done work enough in this little world to give them a right to do some talking. They, at least, can speak their boast, and hear it seconded, in the bold accents their mothers taught them, on every shore and on every sea. They have been the world's day-laborers now for some centuries. They have felled its forests, drained its marshes, dug in its mines, ploughed its wastes, built its cities. They have done rough pioneer work over all its surface. They have done it, too, as it never was done before. They have made it stay done. They have never given up one inch of conquered ground. They have never yielded back one square foot to barbarism. Won once to civilization, under their leadership, and your square mile of savage waste and jungle is won forever.

We are inclined to think the world might bear with us. We talk a great deal about ourselves, perhaps; but, on the whole, are we not buying the privilege? Did a race ever buckle to its business in this world in more splendid style than our own? With both hands clenched, stripped to the waist, blackened and begrimed and sweat bathed, this race takes its place in the vanguard of the world and bends to its chosen toil. The grand, patient, hopeful people, how they grasp blind brute nature, and tame her, and use her at their word! How they challenge and defeat in the death grapple the grim giants of the waste and the storm—fever, famine, and the frost!

You will find them down, to-day, among the firedamps in the mines, to-morrow among the splendid pinnacles of the mountains, to settle a fact of science, or add a mite to human knowledge. Here is one, painfully toiling through the tangled depths of a desert continent, to find a highway for commerce or Christianity. Here is another, in the lonely seas around the pole, where the ghostly ice-mountains go drifting through the gray mists, patiently wrestling with the awful powers of nature, to snatch its secret from the hoary deep, and bring it home in triumph. Hard fisted, big boned, tough brained, and stout hearted, scared at nothing, beaten back by no resistance, baffled, for long, by no obstacle, this race works as though the world were only one vast workshop, and they wanted all the tools and all the materials, and were anxious to monopolize the work of the world.

They are workers primarily, makers, producers, builders. Labor is their appointed business as a people. Sometimes they have to fight, when fools stand in their way, or traitors oppose their endeavors. They have had to do, indeed, their fair share of fighting. Things go so awry in this world that a patient worker is often called to drop his tools, square himself, and knock down some idiot who insists on bothering him. And this race of ours has therefore often, patient as it is, flamed out into occasional leonine wrath. It really does not like fighting. That performance interferes with its proper business. It takes to the ploughshare more kindly than to the sabre, and likes to manage a steam engine better than a six-gun battery. But if imbeciles and scoundrels will get in its way, and will mar its pet labors, then, heaven help them! The patient blood blazes into lava, fire, the big muscles strain over the black cannon, the brawny arm guides the fire-belching tower of iron on the sea, and, when these people do fight, they fight, like the Titans when they warred with Jove, with a roar that shakes the spheres. They go at that as they do at everything. They fight to clear this confusion up, to settle it once for all, so it will stay settled, that they may go to their work again in peace. Fond of a clean job, they insist on making a clean job of their fighting, if they have to fight at all.

'But, after all, this race of ours is selfish,' you say. 'It works only for itself, and you are making something grand and heroic out of that. If it civilizes, it civilizes for itself. If it builds cities, drains marshes, redeems jungles, explores rivers, builds railroads, and prints newspapers, it is doing all for its own pocket.' Well, we say, why not? Is the laborer not worthy of his hire? Do you expect a patient, toiling people to conquer a waste continent here, for God and man, and get nothing for it from either? A people never yet did a good stroke of work in this world without getting a fair day's wages for the job. The old two-fisted Romans, in their day, did a good deal of hard work in the way of road and bridge building, and the like of that, across the sea, and did it well, and they got paid for it by several centuries of mastery over Europe. We rather think, high as the pay was, and little as the late Romans seem to have deserved it, it was, on the whole, a profitable bargain for Europe. The truth is, our race has, like all other great creating races, been building wiser than it knew. It is not necessary that such a race should be conscious of its mission. In its own intention it may work for itself. By the guiding of the Great Master, it does work for all humanity and all time. If a race comes on the earth mere fighters, brigands, and thieves, living by force, fraud, and oppression, even then it serves a purpose. It destroys something that needs destroying. In its own turn, however, it must perish. But an honest race, that undertakes to earn its honest living on the earth, and in the main does earn it, honestly and industriously, by planting and building, like our own, never works merely for itself. It plants and builds to stand forever. The results of patient toil never perish. They are so much clear gain to humanity.

To many, the conscious end of the existence of the Yankee nation may have been a small affair indeed. That end is only what they make it. Its unconscious end is, however, another matter. That end God has made. To one man, the nation exists that he may make wooden clocks and sell them. To another, the chief end of the nation's existence is that he may get a good crop of wheat to market during rising quotations. To another, that he may do a good stroke of business in the boot and shoe line. To another, that he may make a good thing in stocks. To some in the past, this nation existed solely that men might breed negroes in Virginia, and work them in Alabama! This great nation was worth the blacks it owned, and the cotton it raised! Actually that was all. The conscious end to thousands amounted to about this. Men looked at the nation from their own small place. They dwarfed its purposes. They made them small and mean and low. They did this three years ago more commonly, we think, than they do now. The war has taught us many things. It has certainly taught us higher ideas of the value of the Nation, and a loftier idea of the meaning of its life. We have awaked to the fact that we are trustees of this continent for the world. We have been fighting for two years and more, not to save this nation for the value of its wheat, or cotton, or manufactures, or exports, but for the value of the ideas, the hopes, the aspirations, the tendencies this nation embodies. We have risen to see that it were a good bargain to barter all the material wealth it holds for the priceless spiritual ideas it represents. France babbles about 'going to war for an idea.' We don't babble. We buckle on our armor and fight, we practical, money-making Yankees, who are said to value everything by dollars, and, after two years of tremendous fighting, are half amazed ourselves to find we have been fighting solely for a half-dozen ideas the world can lose only at the cost of despair. Since the days when men left house and home and friends, with red crosses on their hearts, to redeem from the hands of the infidel the sepulchre which the dead Christ once made holy, the world has never seen a war carried on for a more purely ideal end than our own. We fight for the integrity of the Nation. We fight for what that word means of hope and confidence and freedom and advancement to the groaning and bewildered world. We say, let all else perish,—wealth, commerce, agriculture, cunning manufacture, humanizing art. We expend all to save the Nation. That priceless possession we shall hold intact to the end, for ourselves, our children, and the coming years!

Let us see what this thing is that we prize so highly. Let us see if we are paying any too high a price for our object—if it is worth a million lives and a countless treasure. What is the Nation?

There used to be a theory of 'the Social Compact.' It was a prominent theory in the French Revolution, It was vastly older, however, than that event. It was originally a theory of the Epicureans. Ovid has something to say about it. Horace advocates it. It has not perished. It exists in a fragmentary way in some books taught in colleges. It has more or less of a hold still on many minds. This theory teaches that the natural state of man is a state of warfare, an isolated savagery, where each man's hand is against his neighbor, each lord and master for himself, with no rights except what force gives him, and no possessions except what he can hold by force. This natural state, however, was found to be a very uncomfortable state, and so men contrive to get out of it as soon as possible. For this purpose they form a 'social compact.' They come together, and agree to give up some of their natural rights to a settled government, on condition that government protect them in the others. That is to say, naturally they have the right to steal all they can lay their hands on, to rob, plunder, murder, and commit adultery, if they have the power, and, generally, to live like a pack of amiable tiger cats; but that these pleasant and amusing natural rights they consent to give up, on condition they are relieved from the trouble of guarding others. Just such babblement as that you can read in very learned books, and stuff like that has actually been taught in colleges, and nobody was sent to the lunatic asylum! That is the theory of the 'Social Compact.' That is the way, according to that theory, that nations are made.

It is enough to say of this old heathen dream, that there never was such a state of savage brutalism known since man was man. All men are born under some law, some government, some controlling authority. As long as fathers and mothers are necessary, in the economy of nature, to a man's getting into the world at all, it is very hard for him to escape law and control when he comes. I was never asked whether I would be a citizen of the United States, whether it was my high will to come into 'the Social Compact' existing here. Neither were you. No man ever was. Just fancy the United States solemnly asking all the infants born this year, 'if they are willing to join the social compact and behave themselves in the country as respectable babies should!

It is vastly better to take facts and try to comprehend and use them. And, as a fact, man is not naturally a brute beast. He never had to make a Social Compact. He has always found one made ready to his hand. Some established order, some national life has always stood ready to receive the new recruit to the ranks of humanity, put him in his place, and ask him no questions. He is made for society. Society is made for him. He is not isolated, but joined to his fellows by links stronger than iron, by bands no steel can sever. The nation stands waiting for him. In some shape, with some development of national life, but always essentially the same, the nation takes him, plastic at his birth, into its great hands, and moulds and fashions him, by felt and unfelt influences, whether he will or no, into the national shape and figure.

And that is what nations are made for. They do not exist to produce wheat, corn, cattle, cotton, or cutlery, but to produce men. The wheat, corn, and the rest exist for the sake of the men. The real value of the nation, to itself and to the world, is not the things it produces, but the style of man it produces. That is the broad difference between China and Massachusetts, between Japan and New York. Nations exist to be training schools for men. That is their real business. Accordingly as they do it better or worse they are prospering or the reverse. What is France about? The newspaper people tell me she is building ships, drilling zouaves, diplomatizing at Rome, brigandizing in Mexico, huzzaing for glory and Napoleon the Third. That is about the wisdom of the newspapers. She is moulding a million unsuspecting little innocents into Frenchmen! That is what she is at, and nobody seems to notice. What is England doing? Weaving cotton, when she can get it, I am told, drilling rifle brigades, blustering in the Times, starving her workmen in Lancashire, and feasting her Prince in London, talking 'strict neutrality' in Parliament, and building pirates on the Clyde. She's doing worse than that. That is not half her wrong-doing. She is taking thousands of plastic, impressible, innocent babes, into her big hands, monthly, and kneading them and hardening them into regular John Bulls! That's a pretty job to think of!

So the nations are at work all over the world. And the nation that, as a rule, takes 'mamma's darling' into its arms, and in twenty or thirty years makes him the best specimen of a man, is the most perfect nation and best fulfils a nation's purpose.

For the business of Education, which so many consider the schoolmaster's speciality, is a larger business than they think. The Family exists to do it, the Church exists to do it. It is the real business of the State. The great Universe itself, with all its vastness, its powers and its mysteries, was created for this. It is simply God's great schoolroom. He has floored it with the emerald queen of the earth and of the gleaming seas. He has roofed it with a sapphire dome, lit with flaming starfire and sun blaze. He has set the great organ music of the spheres reverberating forevermore through its high arches. He has put his children here, to train them for their grand inheritance. He has ordered nature and life and circumstance for this one great end.

Therefore the Nation is not a joint-stock company. It is not a paper association. It is not a mutual assurance society for life and property. That is the shallow, surface notion that makes such miserable babble in political speeches. The Nation is Divine and not Human. It is of God's making and not of man's. It is a moral school, a spiritual training institute for educating and graduating men. For that purpose it is alive. Men can make associations, companies, compacts. God only makes living bodies, divine, perpetual institutions, with life in themselves, which exist because man exists, which can never end till man ends. The Family is one of these. The Church is another, in any shape it comes. The Nation is another, holding Family and Church both in its arms.

True, from the fact that the power, the administration and the arrangements of details are in men's hands in the nation mistake is common, and people are tempted to think the Nation purely human. All thought below the surface will show the fallacy and stamp the Nation as the handiwork of God.

We believe true thought on this matter is, at this day and in this land, of first importance. The Lord of Hosts rules, and not the master of a thousand regiments with smoking cannon. God builds the Nation for a purpose. While it fulfils that purpose it shall stand. The banded folly and scoundrelhood within and the gathered force of all enemies without shall never overthrow one pillar in its strong foundations or topple down one stone from its battlements while it works honestly toward its true end. Not till it turn traitor to its place and purposes, not till it madly plant itself in the way of the great wheels that roll the world back to light and justice, will He who built it hurl it to the earth again in crashing ruin, to build another order in its place. The man who has let that great truth, written out in flame across the dusky forehead of the Past, slip from his foolish atheist's heart and his shallow atheist's brain, is blind, not only to our own land's short history, but to the lessons of the long ages and the broad world.

We have been driven back to the loftiest ground on this question. We have found that only on that could we stand. When the very foundations of what we held most awful and reverential have been assailed by mad traitorous hands, as though they were vulgar things, when frenzied self-will has laid its profane grasp upon the Ark of the Covenant, we have been forced back to those strong foundations on which nations stand, for hope and confidence, to those tremendous sanctions that girdle in, as with the fires of God, the sanctity of Law, the majesty of Order, and established Right. We have declared these things Divine. We have said men administer truly, but men did not create, and men have no right to destroy. We arise in the defence of institutions of which Jehovah has made us the guardians for men!

We have said the Nation exists to train men, that the best nation is the one that trains the best men. Let us see how it does this.

In the first place, it educates by Written Law. To be sure, laws are passed to define and protect human rights, in person, purse, family, or good name. People sometimes think that is all they do. But consider. These laws on the Statute Book are the Nation's deliberate convictions, so far, on right and wrong, a real code of morals, the decisions of the national conscience on moral subjects. An act is passed punishing theft. It is intended to protect property indeed, but it does more. It stands there, the Nation's conviction on a point of ethics. Theft is absolutely wrong. It passes another act punishing perjury. The mere lawyer looks at this solely as a facility for getting at the truth before a jury. It is vastly more. It is a moral decision. The Nation binds the Ten Commandments on the popular conscience, and declares, 'Thou shalt not bear false witness.' It declares, 'There are everlasting distinctions, things absolutely right, and things absolutely wrong. So far has the conscience of the Nation made things clear. The good citizen knows all this without the Statute Book, and much more. But there must be a limit somewhere. Here it is. Up to this point you may come, but no farther. Everlasting distinctions must be taught by bolts, chains, and scaffolds, if there are those in the Nation who will learn them from no other teachers.'

It has been very easy to tamper with Law among ourselves, very easy to try experiments. And people get the notion that Law is a mere human affair, the act of a legislature, the will of a majority. It is all a mistake. A Nation's living laws are the slow growth of ages. They are its solemn convictions on wrongs and rights, written in its heart. The business of a wise legislator is to help all those convictions to expression in formal enactment. Meddling fools try to choke them, pass acts against them even, think they can annihilate such convictions. One day the convictions insist on being heard, if not by formal law, then by terrible informal protest against some legalized wrong. Think how laboriously lawmakers have toiled to prevent the expression of the Nation's determined convictions on the subject of Slavery! Think of the